A grand guy

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Frank Kermode

Frank Kermode has been known for decades as one of the great critics of English literature. Now his subtly nuanced attention turns to a different kind of text: the experiences of his own life. Throughout his luminous, witty memoir, Kermode touches on deeper, lighter, ineffable issues of autobiography, and he does so with his characteristic grace and precision. In Not Entitled, the miraculous connections between life and literature, between the world and the word, are transformed and ennobled.

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John Baxter

In the rural Australia of the fifties where John Baxter grew up, reading books was disregarded with suspicion, owning and collecting them with utter incomprehension. Despite this, by the age of eleven Baxter had 'collected' his first book - The Poems of Rupert Brooke. He'd read the volume often, but now he had to own it. This was the beginning of what would become a major collection and a lifelong obsession. His book-hunting would take him all over the world, but his first real find was in London in 1978, when he spotted a rare copy of a Graham Greene children's book while browsing on a stall in Swiss Cottage. It was going for 5 pence. This would also, fortuitously, be the day when he first encountered one of the legends of the book-selling world: Martin Stone. At various times pothead, international fugitive from justice, and professional rock musician, he would become John's mentor and friend. In this brilliantly readable and funny book, John Baxter brings us into contact with such literary greats as Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, J.G. Ballard and Ray Bradbury. But he also shows us how he penetrated the secret fraternity of 'runners' or book scouts - sleuths who use bluff and guile to hunt down their quarry - and joined them in scouring junk shops, markets, auction rooms and private homes for rarities. In the comic tradition of Clive James's Unreliable Memoirs, A Pound of Paper describes how a boy from the bush came to be living in a Paris penthouse with a library worth millions. It also explores the exploding market in first editions. What treasures are lying unnoticed in your garage?

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Nile Southern and Josh Alan Friedman

"Acclaimed novelist, Beat godfather, prolific screenwriter, and one of the founders of New Journalism, Terry Southern was an audacious, outrageous American original. Now Dig This is an uncensored and hugely entertaining collection that spans the gamut of his stellar career. In Now Dig This, we meet "the rightful heir to Nathanael West" (Norman Mailer), the man Newsweek called "a hip social anarchist, and ... comic pornographer with a profound moral sense." From an interview with Henry Green during the salad days of The Paris Review, to his account of life neck-high in girls and cocaine aboard The Rolling Stones' tour jet, Now Dig This is a journey through Terry Southern's America. It paints a life at the height of social change spanning his Texas boyhood, the buttoned-down 1950s, through the sexual revolution, rock 'n' roll, and independent cinema [which he inaugurated by helping to produce, and cowriting, Easy Rider].". "Gathered from Southern's archives are interviews, early short stories, a piece from his time as The Rolling Stones' court reporter, his hilarious unpublished expose on the Cuban invasion, as well as intimate, at times scandalous, portraits of William S. Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman, Stanley Kubrick, George Plimpton, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Jean Genet. Also included is Southern's Esquire article about the 1968 National Democratic Convention, which led to his role as a key witness in the conspiracy trial of the Chicago 7, and his account of the filming of the famous missing pie-fight scene from Dr. Strangelove."--BOOK JACKET.

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ed. Ryan Boudinot

"This bookish history of Seattle includes essays, history and personal stories from such literary luminaries as Frances McCue, Tom Robbins, Garth Stein, Rebecca Brown, Jonathan Evison, Tree Swenson, Jim Lynch, and Sonora Jha among many others. Timed with Seattle's bid to become the second US city to receive the UNESCO designation as a City of Literature, this deeply textured anthology pays homage to the literary riches of Seattle. Strongly grounded in place, funny, moving, and illuminating, it lends itself both to a close reading and to casual browsing, as it tells the story of books, reading, writing, and publishing in one of the nation's most literary cities"--